DOCSLIB.ORG

Mr. Claro -- Modern Nonfiction Reading Selection by Cynthia Ozick the First Day of School: Washington Square, 1946 RAISED IN

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Mr. Claro -- Modern Nonfiction Reading Selection by Cynthia Ozick the First Day of School: Washington Square, 1946 RAISED IN Untitled Document Mr. Claro -- Modern Nonfiction Reading Selection by Cynthia Ozick The First Day of School: Washington Square, 1946 RAISED IN THE BRONX, Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) took her B.A. at New York University, went out to Ohio State University/or her M.A., married a lawyer, bore a daughter, and returned to live in New Rochelle. She is a novelist and short-story writer, with a strong second calling in the essay. Her first novel was Trust in 1966. More recently she published a book of short stories, Levitation (1982); an essay collection, Art and Ardor (1983); and in the same year another novel, The Cannibal Galaxy. Also in 1983 she was presented with one of the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Awards, thirty-five thousand dollars a year for five years in support of her work. In 1987 she published The Messiah of Stockholm, only four years after her previous novel, which had come sixteen years after her first. "The First Day of School" appeared in Harper's in 1989 when she also published Metaphor and Memory, a collection of essays. In the same year she published The Shawl, a novella and a short story about the Holocaust. In an interview in Publishers Weekly, Ozick discloses unusual habits. Most writers as they get older tend to write early in the morning, when they feel their energy highest. Cynthia Ozick writes late at night. She finishes when dawn arrives with "the racket of those damn birds. The depth of the night is guilt free, responsibility free; nobody will telephone you, importune you, make any claims on you. You own the world." She also acknowledges that "my first draft is the last." But she defines "first draft" so that we understand her: A first draft can be the product of much scratching around. "I must perfect each sentence madly before I go on to the next," she says, because "at the end I want to be finished." This portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare - the look of having had something of a social history. - HENRY JAMES, Washington Square I first came down to Washington Square on a colorless February morning in 1946. I was seventeen and a half years old and was carrying my lunch in a brown paper bag, just as I had carried it to high school file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Joe%20Claro/D...OOL/gr%2012%2003-04/Nonfic%20pieces/Ozick/Ozick.htm (1 of 7)11/18/2005 8:11:07 PM Untitled Document only a month before. It was - I thought it was - the opening day of spring term at Washington Square College, my initiation into my freshman year at New York University All I knew of NYU then was that my science-minded brother had gone there; he had written from the army that I ought to go there too. With master-of-ceremonies zest he described the Browsing Room on the second floor of the Main Building as a paradisal chamber whose bookish loungers leafed languidly through magazines and exchanged high-principled witticisms between classes. It had the sound of a carpeted Olympian club in Oliver Wendell Holmes's Boston, Hub of the Universe, strewn with leather chairs and delectable old copies of The Yellow Book. On that day I had never heard of Oliver Wendell Holmes or The Yellow Book, and Washington Square was a faraway bower where wounded birds fell out of trees. My brother had once brought home from Washington Square Park a baby sparrow with a broken leg, to be nurtured back to flight. It died instead, emitting in its last hours melancholy faint cheeps, and leaving behind a dense recognition of the minute explicitness of morality All the same, in the February grayness Washington Square had the allure of the celestial unknown. A sparrow might die, but my own life was luminously new: I felt my youth like a nimbus. Which dissolves into the dun gauze of a low and sullen city sky And here I am flying out of the Lexington Avenue subway at Astor Place, just a few yards from Wanamaker's, here I am turning a corner past a secondhand bookstore and a union hall; already late, I begin walking very fast toward the park. The air is smoky with New York winter grit, and on clogged Broadway a mob of trucks shifts squawking gears. But there, just ahead, crisscrossed by paths under high branches, is Washington Square; and on a single sidewalk, three clear omens - or call them riddles, intricate and redolent. These I will disclose in a moment, but before that you must push open the heavy brass-and-glass doors of the Main Building and come with me, at a hard and panting pace, into the lobby of Washington Square College on the earliest morning of my freshman year. On the left, a bank of elevators. Straight ahead, a long burnished corridor, spooky as a lit tunnel. And empty, all empty I can hear my solitary footsteps reverberate, as in a radio mystery drama: They lead me up a short staircase into a big dark ghost-town cafeteria. My brother's letter, along with his account of the physics and chemistry laboratories (I will never see them), has already explained that this place is called Commons - and here my heart will learn to shake with the merciless newness of life. But not today; today there is nothing. Tables and chairs squat in dead silhouette. I race back through a silent maze of halls and stairways to the brass-and-glass doors -there stands a lonely guard. From the pocket of my coat I retrieve a scrap with a classroom number on it and ask the way The guard announces in a sly croak that the first day of school is not yet; come back tomorrow, he says. A dumb bad joke: I'm humiliated. I've journeyed the whole way down from the end of the line - Pelham Bay, in the northeast Bronx - to find myself in desolation, all because of a muddle: Tuesday isn't file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Joe%20Claro/D...OOL/gr%2012%2003-04/Nonfic%20pieces/Ozick/Ozick.htm (2 of 7)11/18/2005 8:11:07 PM Untitled Document Wednesday The nimbus of expectation fades. The lunch bag in my fist takes on a greasy sadness. I'm not ready to dive back into the subway - I'll have a look around. Across the street from the Main Building, the three omens. First, a pretzel man with a cart. He's wearing a sweater, a cap that keeps him faceless -he's nothing but the shadows of his creases - and wool gloves with the fingertips cut off. He never moves; he might as well be made of papiermach6, set up and left out in the open since spring. There are now almost no pretzels for sale, and this gives me a chance to inspect the construction of his bare pretzel-poles. The pretzels are hooked over a column of gray cardboard cylinders, themselves looped around a stick, the way horseshoes drop around a post. The cardboard cylinders are the insides of toilet paper rolls. The pretzel man is rooted between a Chock Full 0' Nuts (that's the second omen) and a newsstand (that's the third). The Chock Full: The doors are like fans, whirling remnants of conversation. She will marry him. She will not marry him. Fragrance of coffee and hot chocolate. We can prove that the sens~es are partial and unreliable vehicles of information, but who is to say that reason is not equally a product of human limitation? Powdered doughnut sugar on their lips. Attached to a candy store, the newsstand. Copies of Partisan Review: the table of the gods. Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Stephen Spender, William Phillips, John Berryman, Saul Bellow, Philip Rahv, Richard Chase, Randall Jarrell, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Shapiro, George Orwell! I don't know a single one of these names, but I feel their small conflagration flaming in the gray street: the succulent hotness of their promise. I mean to penetrate every one of them. Since all the money I have is my subway fare - a nickel - I don't buy a copy (the price of Partisan in 1946 is fifty cents); I pass on. I pass on to the row of houses on the north side of the square. Henry 10 James was born in one of these, but I don't know that either. Still, they are plainly old, though no longer aristocratic: haughty last-century shabbies with shut eyelids, built of rosy-ripe respectable brick, down on their luck. Across the park bulks Judson Church, with its squat squarish bell tower; by the end of the week I will be languishing at the margins of a basketball game in its basement, forlorn in my blue left-over-from-high-school gym suit and mooning over Emily Dickinson: There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons -That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes - There is more I don't know. I don't know that W. H. Auden lives just down there, and might at any moment be seen striding toward home under his tall rumpled hunch; I don't know that Marianne Moore is only up the block, her doffed tricorn resting on her bedroom dresser.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
    The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick 1 Table of Contents The Shawl “Just as you can’t About the Book.................................................... 3 grasp anything About the Author ................................................. 5 Historical and Literary Context .............................. 7 without an Other Works/Adaptations ..................................... 9 opposable thumb, Discussion Questions.......................................... 10 you can’t write Additional Resources .......................................... 11 Credits .............................................................. 12 anything without the aid of metaphor. Metaphor is the mind’s opposable thumb.” Preface What is the NEA Big Read? No event in modern history has inspired so many books as A program of the National Endowment for the Arts, NEA Big the Holocaust. This monumental atrocity has compelled Read broadens our understanding of our world, our thousands of writers to reexamine their notions of history, communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a humanity, morality, and even theology. None of these good book. Managed by Arts Midwest, this initiative offers books, however, is quite like Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl—a grants to support innovative community reading programs remarkable feat of fiction which starts in darkest despair and designed around a single book. brings us, without simplification or condescension, to a glimmer of redemption. A great book combines enrichment with enchantment. It awakens our imagination and enlarges our humanity.
    [Show full text]
  • The Golem Myth in Cynthia Ozick's The
    Demanding Connection: The Golem Myth in Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers and Thane Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham MA-thesis English language and culture: education and communication R.D.Ekhart 0114812 Utrecht University April 2010 Supervisor: dr. Derek Rubin Table of Contents Introduction 3 1. Demanding Connection: 8 Contemporary Jewish American Fiction 2. A Jewish Cultural Memory: 14 The Myth of the Golem 3. Creation and Redemption in Cynthia Ozick’s 21 The Putterrmesser Papers 4. Creation and Redemption in Thane Rosenbaum’s 32 The Golems of Gotham Conclusion 45 Works Cited 47 Front page image: Instructions on how to make a golem Source: http://www.templesanjose.org/JudaismInfo/tradition/Golem_files/image005.jpg 2 Introduction “And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7, ASV) “She demands connection - surely, a Jew must own a past” (Ozick, Puttermesser Papers 17). Cynthia Ozick’s protagonist Ruth Puttermesser is determined to find herself an ancestor. She needs someone who represents a past that can define her present. Owning a past is one way of defining what constitutes Jewishness. Edward Shapiro makes it clear what exactly makes Jewish identity problematic: “the problem of Jewish identity lies in the question whether Jewishness is a matter of religion, history, culture or ethnicity” ( Introduction , 286). Jews of all places and all times have struggled with the question of what defines the Jewish self. This question has different answers for different Jews at different times and in different places and it is true that, as Jonathan Rosen says, “every generation has its own story to tell” (257).
    [Show full text]
  • The Form and Feeling of Leonard Michaels' Jewish-American Literature
    Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Washington University Spring 2018 Senior Honors Thesis Abstracts Spring 2018 The Form and Feeling of Leonard Michaels’ Jewish-American Literature Harrison Hall Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/wushta_spr2018 Recommended Citation Hall, Harrison, "The Form and Feeling of Leonard Michaels’ Jewish-American Literature" (2018). Spring 2018. 52. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/wushta_spr2018/52 This Abstract for College of Arts & Sciences is brought to you for free and open access by the Washington University Senior Honors Thesis Abstracts at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Spring 2018 by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. English The Form and Feeling of Leonard Michaels’ Jewish-American Literature Harrison Hall Mentor: Nancy Berg The conventional narrative to describe Jewish-American literature tracks a departure and possible return to a Jewish culture and heritage. However, the twentieth¬ to twenty- first century writer Leonard Michaels did not display such a shift. In the 1960s, his style evoked what he termed the “weird delirium” of a counter-culture in New York City. His early stories draw heavily on his onomatopoeic conception of the Yiddish language and describe cultural Jews living and fighting in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Later in his life, Michaels adopted a simpler style and set his final collection, The Nachman Stories, in California. This change led some to criticize Michaels for abandoning literature more obviously aligned with mid-twentieth century Jewish-American experience.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013
    University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2016-02 Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013 Thacker, Robert University of Calgary Press Thacker, R. "Reading Alice Munro: 1973-2013." University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/51092 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca READING ALICE MUNRO, 1973–2013 by Robert Thacker ISBN 978-1-55238-840-2 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission.
    [Show full text]
  • The Story About the Story Great Writers Explore Great Literature
    The Story About the Story Great Writers Explore Great Literature Edited by J. C. Hallman ∏ın House Books Copyright © 2009 Tin House Books Additional copyright information can be found on pages 418-21. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2601 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210. Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The story about the story : great writers explore great literature / edited by J. C. Hallman. -- 1st U.S. ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-9802436-9-7 1. Literature--History and criticism. 2. Authors--Books and reading. I. Hallman, J. C. PN45.S857 2009 809--dc22 2009015717 First U.S. edition 2009 Interior design by Janet Parker Printed in Canada www.tinhouse.com Table of Contents introduction: Toward a Fusion ...........................................................................................8 J. C. Hallman Salinger and Sobs ......................................................................................14 Charles D’Ambrosio An Essay in Criticism ................................................................................35 Virginia Woolf On a Stanza by John Keats ......................................................................42
    [Show full text]
  • Cynthia Ozick, Critic
    Joseph Epstein When Jews Boxed JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 7, Number 3 Fall 2016 $10.45 Dara Horn Cynthia Ozick, Critic Shoshana Olidort Jonathan Safran Foer’s Midlife Doorstop Plus Elliott Horowitz Caffeinated Mysticism Alvin H. Rosenfeld Primo Levi’s Achievement Allan Arkush Kirsch’s Canon Rafael Medoff Zion and the American Election, 1944 Jonathan Sacks and Shlomo Riskin On Jewish Power: An Exchange Editor JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS Abraham Socher Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush Art Director Betsy Klarfeld Please join us Managing Editor Amy Newman Smith Editorial Assistant Sunday, November 6, 2016 Kate Elinsky Editorial Board Our 2nd Annual Conference Speakers Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Jon D. Levenson Anita Shapira Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein Publisher Eric Cohen Eliot Cohen Moshe Halbertal Shai Held Johns Hopkins University NYU Law School and Rosh Yeshiva Associate Publisher & The Hebrew University Mechon Hadar Director of Marketing Lori Dorr Advancement Officer Malka Groden JRB Publication Committee Anonymous Marilyn and Michael Fedak Dara Horn Meir Soloveichik Bret Stephens Martin J. Gross Distinguished novelist Congregation Shearith Israel Wall Street Journal and Yeshiva University Pulitizer Prize recipient Susan and Roger Hertog Roy J. Katzovicz Judy and Leonard Lauder Steven Price George Rohr Daniel Senor Judy and Michael Steinhardt The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, Online Joseph H. H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier Ruth R. Wisse ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly publication of ideas and NYU Law School and The Brookings Institution Harvard University criticism published in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, European University Institute and The Tikvah Fund by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 745 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1400, New York, NY 10151.
    [Show full text]
  • 9783631639092 Intro 002.Pdf
    Introduction The world of belles-lettres usually invites an intellectual, aesthetic or historical approach. I remain convinced of the legitimacy of using fiction as a resource towards a better understanding of collective mentality. In this project I have attempted to apply this approach with the aim of allowing an insight into Jewish American perception of Poles, Poland and Polishness, as well as with the hope of obtaining a closer look at Polish-Jewish dialogue, or, as is often the case, its vagaries into communication breakdowns. Looking at Polish-Jewish dialogue through the perspective of American literature turns it into a conversation1 in which various very different stakeholders are involved: American Jews, Polish Americans, Poles from Poland, Polish Jews. There is more to this complexity than meets the eye. Fiction reflects social reality, even when it is in thrall to experimentation with various post-modern departures from narrative forms or when it escapes from representation. There is no doubt that books read exert influence upon those who read them. Another well-known truth is that the extent of influence, measured by the number of copies sold, may stand in stark contrast to critical and scholarly evaluation. Literature remains one of the main channels through which identity and ethnic, cultural or national stereotypes are formulated. The stereotypes formulated and perpetuated in fiction may themselves become cognitive tools in perceiving others. The fragment below on the significance of studying literature for purposes of understanding cultural stereotypes comes from the book Boundaries of Jewish Identity, and more precisely the chapter in which Naomi Sokoloff analyses stereotypes and identity in the fiction of Israeli writers Aharon Appelfeld and Sayed Kashua: There is no doubt that the images promoted in literature have played a crucial role over many centuries in shaping cultural identities, fostering ethnic awareness, and even spurring nationalist movements.
    [Show full text]
  • Cynthia Ozick
    JRB FICTION Joseph Epstein • Dara Horn • Abraham Socher • Adam Kirsch Michael Weingrad • Matti Friedman • Nadia Kalman and more JEWISH REVIEW of BOOKS JRB|Fiction JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 1 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, Online ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly print publication with an active online presence for serious readers with Jewish interests published by Bee.Ideas, LLC. New York, NY Copyright © by Bee.Ideas, LLC. www.jewishreviewofbooks.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Bee.Ideas, LLC. ISBN-13: 978-1-941678-05-3 JRB FICTION JEWISH REVIEW of BOOKS Contents 5 Introduction 6 Upon Such Sacrifices: King Lear and the Binding of Isaac by Noah Millman 14 Before the Big Bang by Daniel C. Matt 18 Joseph Roth: Grieving for a Lost Empire by Joseph Epstein 24 Cynthia Ozick: Or, Immortality by Dara Horn 28 Live Wire by Abraham Socher 35 The Jewbird by Adam Kirsch 40 The Hunter by Rich Cohen 46 Brave New Golems by Michael Weingrad 53 Coming with a Lampoon by Ruth R. Wisse 57 Who Owns Margot? by Nadia Kalman 60 Appelfeld in Bloom by Shoshana Olidort 62 The Rebbe and the Yak by Alan Mintz 66 Distant Cousins by Matti Friedman Introduction Dear Readers, Perhaps you enjoy our magazine because you agree with A. O. Scott that, “Criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood.” This collection of 13 of our favorite pieces on literature, published over the last decade, is more than list of reading recommendations.
    [Show full text]
  • Crafting the Jewish Writer: Jewish Writing, Professionalism, and the Short Story in Post-War America
    Crafting the Jewish Writer: Jewish Writing, Professionalism, and the Short Story in Post-War America By Daniel Rochelson Mintz A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2013 Dissertation Committee: Professor Anita Norich, Chair Professor Jonathan E. Freedman Associate Professor Julian A. Levinson Professor Deborah D. Moore © Daniel R. Mintz 2013 DEDICATION For Meri-Jane and Joel, Sarah, Sam and Karl ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support of a great many people. My profound thanks are due to my chair, Anita Norich, for her patient guidance, incisive readings, steadfast support, keen practical advice, and for her friendship; and to Julian Levinson, Deborah Dash Moore, Jonathan Freedman, and Patsy Yaeger, for their generous and insightful comments on the dissertation manuscript, for their sage counsel throughout the writing process, and for innumerable occasions of support, encouragement, and illumination. I am grateful, also, for the intellectual and professional direction provided by Todd Endelman, Sarah Blair, Alan Wald, Michael Awkward, Kerry Larson, Susan Najita, Carol Bardenstein, and Danny Hack throughout graduate school and in the early stages of this project’s formation; to Nancy Cho and Susan Jaret McKinstry, whose examples of passion, learning, and humane engagement with literature and with students inspired me to enter the profession, and whose encouragement and support have been sources of strength; and to Karen Sutton and Peggy Haun Monteil, who fostered the deep joy and fulfillment I find in conversations about culture. The financial support of the Horace H.
    [Show full text]
  • The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick
    "Greek Mind/Jewish Soul, I predict, will quickly be recognized as the best work done on Ozick, by far, and one of the best books we have on a contem- porary modern writer."—Frank Lentricchia, Series Editor Since the 1970s, Cynthia Ozick's stories, novels, and essays have gradually earned high critical acclaim. Victor Strandberg's Greek Mind /Jewish Soul is a comprehensive study of this exceptionally gifted author, correlating her creative art and her intellectual development. Strandberg devotes considerable attention to Ozick's struggle to maintain her Jewish religion and culture within a society saturated with Christian and secular values. By examining the influence of Western philosophical and literary traditions on Ozick and her particular social cir- cumstances, Strandberg is able to ask larger questions about the merit of Ozick's work and its place within American literature. Strandberg begins by chronicling the cultural dilemmas of Ozick's early life. The daughter of struggling immigrant parents, Ozick sometimes endured anti-Semitic ostracism from classmates in the New York public schools. But even as she deeply immersed herself in her Judaic heritage, avidly learning Hebrew and studying Jewish history, she found the gentile heritage irresistible, beginning with fairy tales in childhood and graduating to George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. Her studies in Latin likewise awakened a love for classical literature that impinged powerfully upon her books, particularly Trust and The Pagan Rabbi. By drawing on a range of sources, including his own ten-year correspondence with Ozick, Strandberg illuminates Ozick's thinking on volatile issues that trou- bled her during her formative years, including feminism, the Holocaust, and Jewish cultural survival.
    [Show full text]
  • American Jewish Fiction Turns Inward, 1960-1990
    American Jewish Fiction Turns Inward, 1960-1990 by SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN THE PAST 25 YEARS a remarkable literary trend has oc- curred within the fiction of a significant group of contemporary American Jewish writers. These writers have produced a new, inward-turning genre of contemporary American Jewish fiction which explores the individual Jew's connection to the Jewish people, to Jewish religion, culture, and tradition, and to the chain of Jewish history. Although sometimes witty, this body of work wrestles with weighty spiritual matters: Jewish concep- tions of faith and redemption in a post-Holocaust world; the conflict be- tween free will and predestination in the light of Jewish belief and Jewish history; and the notion of the Jewish people as an am segulah, a chosen nation. The new genre of American Jewish fiction has been unabashedly reli- gious in its sensibility; in the words of Cynthia Ozick, one of its main practitioners, it is "liturgical in nature" and "centrally Jewish in its con- cerns."1 It thus differs dramatically from the Jewish fiction of the previ- ous quarter century, which had flourished largely by regarding Jews as a species of court jesters or existential heroes—as insightful outsiders who have special value to the Gentile world. Rather than depicting Jews pri- marily in terms of their universal interest or utility, the new body of fic- tion treats Jews, Jewish values, and idiosyncratic Jewish topics as intrin- sically compelling. In addition, much in the new American Jewish fiction has moved beyond solipsistic preoccupations to an involvement in com- munal concerns, and has found new vitality in exploring the interaction between the two.
    [Show full text]
  • Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish Post-Holocaust Literature
    humanities Article ‘You think your writing belongs to you?’: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish Post-Holocaust Literature Kirstin Gwyer Modern Languages and Literature, Jesus College, Oxford OX1 3DW, UK; [email protected] Received: 14 February 2018; Accepted: 22 February 2018; Published: 1 March 2018 Abstract: This article examines a sub-category of recent Jewish post-Holocaust fiction that engages with the absent memory of the persecution its authors did not personally witness through the medium of intertextuality, but with intertextual recourse not to testimonial writing but to literature only unwittingly or retrospectively shadowed by the Holocaust. It will be proposed that this practice of intertextuality constitutes a response to the post-Holocaust Jewish author’s ‘anxiety of influence’ that, in the wake of the first generation’s experience of atrocity, their own life story and literature will always appear derivative. With reference to works by four such post-Holocaust authors, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), Maxim Biller’s Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz (2013), Helen Maryles Shankman’s In the Land of Armadillos (2016), and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Forest Dark (2017), all of which engage intertextually with Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz, it will be suggested that these authors are looking to return to a Kristevan practice of intertextuality after the predominantly citational recourse to antecedent material that has often characterized post-Holocaust literature. In the process, they also succeed in troubling recently popular conceptualizations of ‘postmemory’ literature as the ‘belated’ and ‘evacuated’ recipient of encrypted traumatic content inherited from the first generation that it must now seek either to preserve or to work through vicariously.
    [Show full text]